Kurt Johnson

Millbrook, New York.  More photos from Ryan & Colleen's wedding last weekend are here. 

We're all settled in Texas (have been since August, actually).  Susanne and I are both working full time and it looks like our vacation schedules are going to keep us close to home for a while. It's not unexpected at all - in fact it's what drove us to the specific destinations we visited over our long summer break.

Although it's hard to sum up all of the traveling we did I'll offer a few observations.  First, it is amazing how easy it is to get around the world.  The internet, message boards, Skype, and the emergence of English as a lingua franca all make arranging travel pretty straightforward. Currency exchange and power plugs are increasingly simple.  Corruption and personal insecurity are, I think, much less of a threat than newspapers would have you believe - aside from tourist pricing and some crooked cab drivers we did not encounter a bribe solicitation or theft on the entire trip (except possibly a suitcase lost in transit by British Airways/Swiss).  At no point did we get hassled by customs about carrying several thousand dollars worth of electronics.  Electronic communication is ubiquitous - we saw locals on cell phone calls in the middle of the Serengeti and using a BlackBerry in rural Laos.  Every country we visited had Visa ATMs, and only in Laos and Tanzania was there any inconvenience in finding one that took a Mastercard.  We had no food related health problems despite eating plenty of street food, and in the two cases where we needed medical supplies the local pharmacies were easy to deal with.  Renting cars in Germany and South Africa was easy and renting mopeds in Southeast Asia was done for $6 with no paperwork.  The only time we really had travel headaches was in China when we were forced to cut out the Tibet leg of our trip.

A few highlights of the trip - you'll notice there's a lot of food involved:

• In Thailand, visiting temples, eating constantly, and learning to SCUBA
• In Cambodia, visiting villages, seeing the ruins of Angkor, and learning about the years under the Khmer Rouge
• In Laos, cheap seafood restaurants, watching locals on the Mekong river, elephant rides, and fresh baguette sandwiches from the hardworking lady in the Hmong market near our hotel
• In Vietnam, visiting the house where Susanne's dad grew up; eating pho and cha gio from street vendors in Saigon and piles of fresh mangoes near the beach in Nha Trang
• In China, walking the Great Wall and learning to bargain in Beijing
• In Germany, driving a BMW on the Autobahn, walking around German farms, and sunset dinners on a patio with fresh food from the garden
• In South Africa, watching sunrise over Cape Town, seeing whales playing off the coast, and driving through the incredibly scenic area near Hermanus and the wine country
• In Tunisia, traditional meals with old friends at a 300-400 year old family home, hearing the call to prayer throughout the day, and seeing artifacts in situ from at least three ancient powers (Arab, Roman, Punic/Carthaginian)
• In Tanzania, descending into the Ngorongoro Crater, seeing herds of elephants in Tarangire National Park, and spending an afternoon with hunter gatherers in a nearly extinct ethnic community (Hadzabe)
• In Italy, St. Peter's Basilica and our daily Nutella gelato

Obviously traveling light helps when one moves every few days. We each had a daypack and a carry-on suitcase with wheels; as we bought souvenirs or cycled through books it was easy to send them home via mail or with people we met during the trip.  About half of my bag was actually made up of electronics, which could have been done a little better but not much.  I took a 14" laptop, Canon SLR (20d), backup SLR (Rebel XTi), 17-55mm/2.8 lens, 100-400mm lens, extra batteries and cleaning supplies, a pocket sized camera (Canon SD450), and a 60GB iPod to back my photos up to.  I wasn't thrilled with carrying around the 100-400mm zoom as it was longer, heavier, and lower quality than my 70-200mm, but given our time on safari it would have been a real loss to give up the 200mm-400mm range.  By the end of the trip (Italy) I was tired of carrying the SLR and pro-weight lenses and would have happily traded them for a high quality compact.  If I had bought a new laptop for the trip I would have targeted the smallest size (12") that could still fit a large hard drive.  Although it would have been nice to ditch the laptop completely it was enormously useful for using WiFi and processing photos on the fly instead of facing a stack of tens of thousands of images to go through when we got home. 

Finally, Susanne says the trip was the best money we ever spent.  Thank goodness we have a robust financial system that lets people with time but no money borrow against future periods when there will be excess money but no time.

You can see all of our photo albums from the trip here.